General Discussion

I once drooled over AC 2. Then I played it. It was "ok" but then I had a run in with Microsoft Customer Support. I lost my credit card. The game billing failed, because I had to cancel my card. I decided I didn't want to renew right away so I waited a few months before signing back up. When I tried to do that I was extremely rudely informed that about fifty dollars had been sent to collections. I was told that my CD Key had been banned and I would have to purchase the game new again in order to play.

Hmm... Other MMO's I was subscribed to at the time gladly took me back...

They wonder why their customer base shriveled. Sure it may have not been the only reason but having subscription policies which seemingly could have only come from the third reich did NOT help them at all.

Did you know if you were unable to pay they would keep billing you and rack up debt?

Did you know if you didnt play for a little while your CD Key was erased/banned?

Every other MMO keeps characters as long as they can. They bill you at the BEGINNING of your month. That way if there are billing issues your account simply becomes inactive.

This game deserved to fail if for no other reason than their abhorrent customer service and typical Microsoft greed. Turbine will do much better now that their two new games will have NOTHING to do with Microsoft.

Guess what I did? I got a FREE copy of the game. I played for my FREE month as much as I possibly could. Then canceled my account before I was billed. NOW I AM DANCING ON THIS PIECE OF SHIT'S GRAVE!!!

I like Turbine and look forward to their future projects but... Good riddance!

Does no one else care that they dodged the question concerning the number of players at the time of shut-down?

I am curious as to how many( or how little) players it takes to close down an MMO. That way I can keep my eyes open.

Well first I will start with the good before the bad.

The Good:

To start off I would like to say that I was a devoted fan to AC1 for almost 4 years and some of my best video game memories are of AC1 with my friends on pvp darktide server.  Ac1 was such a great game with depth, lore, exploration, items, and character creation.  When you built your char you planned it from the get go and when you where done you where proud of your accomplishments unlike many of the games out there to day.  Also AC1 was the best MMORPG PVP engine to date in my own opinion and nothing has even come close to there pvp engine where you can actually dodge spells and arrows :O really some developers need to crack open a dictionary and look up the word Dodge and figure out what it means again.  Anyhow I had nothing but high praises for AC1 before it started getting stupid with bad patch after bad patch.  This is where I think they went wrong with ac2.  In AC 1 they almost never nurfed anything.  They just kept on putting higher and higher content in.  Stronger and stronger content until it was unbalanced as hell.  Then instead of nurfing they just put STRONGER stuff in to balance it until it spiraled into the LVL 150+ range to compete or do anything, utterly destroying the game in my opinion.  I think they went the reverse route with ac2 from what I hear with the nurf bat, but I never played it overly long to find out because it was horrible, which takes me to the bad.

The Bad:

Well the shutting down of AC2 only proves that there is a god.  This game was such an incredible let down to me and all my friends from AC1, it was truly sad.  The only good part of ac2 was the graphics, the rest of it could be flushed down the toilet.  I really don't know what the developers where thinking but right from beta it seemed doomed to fail.  They didn't stick to ANY of there AC1 roots other then some lore and some monsters.  They changed the entire combat engine to some piece of crap engine.  They changed the character building system to a cheap rip off Diablo 2's skill system.  The game felt like Diablo 2 and EQ meshed together instead of AC2.  Why would you create an entirely different game when you have something good as a predecessor, and then expect your fan basis to stay ? This just baffles me to this day.  If they would of just taken the general game mechanics from ac1 down to the world / character template / depth and just put a new graphics engine with some new tweaks, ideas, stories, quests, races, ect, It would still be going today. 
After buying AC2 3 months later I discontinued my subscription and used the cd as a coster as it was the only thing I could think of that was worth the money I spent on the game.  All though it does make a good coaster as I still use it to this day.  The sad part is I took a few more cracks at AC1 and have NEVER EVER looked back at ac2.

Truly sad it is.

But I hope that Turbine has learned a lot from there mistakes and will use it to better there future up coming games.  With that all said I can only feel for the devs as well as it would be hard to shut down such a project, and with the shutdown of AC2 I only hope that one day they will make AC3 and truly get it right.

Lessons learned

-          With a good product a person may tell 1 other person about maybe 2 if your lucky.  With A bad product the person will tell everyone he knows how much it sucks.

-          Sequels only split your subscription / population basis when you create an entirely different game.   I’ve taken the liberty of posting a link where the definition of sequel can be found - http://www.thefreedictionary.com/sequel

-          Listen to you community and try your best to stay on the fence as much as possible when it comes to the decision making time.

-          Don’t release an expansion then shutdown the game.  This just angers the locals :P

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Originally posted by hyperionjr

Does no one else care that they dodged the question concerning the number of players at the time of shut-down?

I am curious as to how many( or how little) players it takes to close down an MMO. That way I can keep my eyes open.

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http://www.mmogchart.com/ is a useful reference for that info.

current market leaders: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
others including AC and AC2: http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html

Similar story here. played AC for 2 years and loved it. Played AC2 for 6 months and finally quit when they nerfed the skill tree of my main class (defender) after lots of other annoying nerfing on each update before that. As i said in the exit survey, its the difference between viable toons grouping to complete a task, and unviable toons being forced to group to do anything.

For those of you who want a quick summary: WoW 2million, AC 37.5k, AC2 15k (at Jan 05)

Also of interest is the Lineage / Lineage 2 population flip. As L2 was massively increasing, its probably significantly because Lineage players were moving over to it. Maybe too early to tell but it does suggest that a sequel doesnt alienate your hardcore gamers by definition. Not having played either though, I couldnt make a call on how similar they are.

they should never have called it AC2, the number of people coming in appalled that it was nothing like AC1 shows people had an expectation for it to be exactly like AC1 and not being open to new ideas.

I am as open to new ideas as the next guy but when you change the entire game and the only things that stayed where some monsters name and a tiny portion or lore its not a "Squeal" its a new game.  So agian I point to the squeal definition.

Lets look at some other games that are successfull that have Squeals

Might and Magic - Changed game features, added new idea's, but kept what original concept in tact.

EQ - Changed game features, added new idea's, but kept what original concept in tact.

Now lets look at AC2

AC 2 - Kept a small portion of lore and a small portion of the creature data base.  Rest of game changed to be a poorly made mesh of D2 and EQ 2

I played the game from Beta and got nerfed out of playing like so many others.
It seems the biggest lesson they still have not learn't is to listen to the people that are paying your wages!!!
I just cancelled my DDO preorder as I really have no faith in Turbines ability to manage a Mmorg.

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One of the key lessons that we learned is the customer perception of sequels in the MMO space. They end up splitting your community more so than growing it. So they are counterproductive, unlike sequels in other game genres where they can be really successful.

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L O L. They needed to actually release a game to learn THAT? ... *shakes head in disbelief*